Kermit Moyer
photo: Jim Youngerman
The New York Times Book Review called Kermit Moyer’s collection of stories, Tumbling, "impeccable", “a work of ringing authenticity” and welcomed him as “an impressive new voice.” Now, in The Chester Chronicles, Moyer again explores the rocky terrain of childhood and adolescence but this time from a single window: the perspective of Chester “Chet” Patterson, an “Army brat” who grows up in the 1950s and comes of age in the 1960s. Chester’s point of view is retrospective, but the immediacy of his present-tense narration puts us right there in the moment—even though “there” is constantly changing since Chester is always in transit, the perennial outsider, stuck with a name that feels like a running joke and plagued with Oedipal anxieties and existential doubt yet nonetheless convinced of his heroic destiny. Each chapter is a discrete story that chronicles a pivotal moment in Chester’s life, taking him a little deeper into himself as well as a little farther into the century,
Like Chester, Kermit Moyer grew up an Army brat in the 1950s. He got his BA, his MA and his PhD in English from Northwestern University and in 1970 joined the faculty of American University in Washington, DC, where he taught literature and creative writing for the next 37 years. His short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, and The Hudson Review, and he is the author of Tumbling, a collection of stories published by the University of Illinois Press. He lives with his wife Amy and their dog Zora on Cape Cod. 
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Winner of the 2011 L.L. Winship PEN New England Fiction Award
AWARD CITATION by By Alan Davis, Fiction Judge for the 2011 PEN New England award:
Chester Patterson, the narrator of The Chester Chronicles by Kermit Moyer, a wonderfully lyrical novel-in-stories set in the 1950s and 1960s, is the son of an Army officer whose duty requires the family to move every two or three years. Chester’s sexual, racial, political and intellectual awakening as he comes of age in a tumultuous era can be humorous, awkward, abrasive, erotic, or even inspirational, but it is always brilliantly rendered and deliciously ironic; Chester’s attempts at heroics or a bon vivant sophistication almost always fail him, to the reader’s great delight. Chester and his family stay in our heads; the book is a triumph of exact detail, and Moyer is a writer to conjure with.
Available from your local Independent Booksellers, The Permanent Press & Amazon.com |
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